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Designing Layout in IBM Connections Communities

Two of the most critical factors in the success or failure of your intranet are the ease of use and the degree to which it catches the eye. 

Unfortunately, theres not a lot of choices you can make with regards to IBM Connections Community design past the front page. Once you hit a forum or a library of files and folders, every single community starts to look the same. 

Luckily though, theres a fair bit of flexibility on the  opening page and on the Wiki Pages.  Ive already covered how to make your community look more appealing in other posts (See Part 1 and Part 2) but I recently created an internal community that I thought might be useful as a design exercise.

A Tiled Community Example

This is an internal "social" community which uses a style similar to the Microsoft Windows 10 tiles. I chose that look because I thought it would be both "fun" and "familiar" to our users.

To build this, I simply made a 4 x 3 table and set it to 100% width. Then I went into each of the four cells in the top row and right clicked on them and set them to 25% width.   This ensures that changes within the cells dont muck things up.

Finally, I went into the Second Row, Second  Column cell and merged right.



From there is was just a matter of creating the pictures.

I decided upon a set size for each icon (about 400 x 400) and used a font icon set to create the white icons.  I also wrote on them using the same font and size.  I included a white border in my picture because I didnt want to have to rely on connections to do my spacing for me.  

The middle tile is double-width so its 800 x 400.

When I added the pictures, I made sure that they were 100% of the cell size (you can do that by right clicking on the image and setting the options).

From there, you just link the images to the places you need them to go.

Other Places to Look

If youre stuck for ideas on how to make your online community look more appealing, go to Google image search and type in "Intranet Designs" and browse through the many different screens.

As you look at them, ask yourself, which bits could be done in a table?

This will give you an idea of how to approach the sites to build them.

Start on paper and roughly draw out what you want on your page -- then try to draw lines around your objects on paper to determine how many rows and columns you need and which ones need to be merged.

Youll find that theres a lot more flexibility than youd expect. 

DB2 on Campus Thank you IBM volunteers!

Reaching thousands of students and visiting hundreds of universities worldwide would be an impossible task for the DB2 Express-C team alone. Thanks to several IBM volunteers the reach of the program has grown considerably. For example, in Vietnam Nguyen Khiem (IBM Software Group Vietnam) has delivered the speech "The role of DB2 Express-C in the information on demand world" in four universities reaching more than 400 students. The picture in this blog is of him delivering this speech.

Another example is Andrea Cristina Rodacki (IBM Brazil). She has been able to reach at least 300 students in Curitiba, Brazil, and has delivered courses for post graduate students about DB2.

Hiromiti Nakagawa, also from IBM Brazil continuously provides support for the program, and is coordinating a big event in Brazil this June to reach 600 students.

In Korea, Cheol Kang has done an incredible job to deliver DB2 classes using the DB2 on Campus materials to 5 univerities reaching more than 700 students.

In Malaysia, Allan Tham will start delivering many DB2 on Campus events once students go back to school in July.

In Mexico, Miguel Angel Garcia Trujillo is doing a terrific job of keeping students motivated and helping the three active (very active!) DB2 user groups created recently. Students in these groups are replicating themselves the program.

In Thailand, Sunicha Eckachai has been able to keep the momentum going of my visit las year. Eight academic institutions in that country will be delivering DB2 classes this year.

Thank you very much to all of these IBM volunteers!

Raul.